Preschool Training in Self-Regulation: Helping Children Help Themselves

“Self-regulation” and “executive functions” (EF) are largely synonymous and refer to such abilities as being able to stop and think before you act or speak, controlling your attention so that you stay on task and are not distracted, holding in mind the teacher’s instructions or your own earlier plans, resisting temptations to act inappropriately, and flexibly adjusting to different playmates or changed priorities.

with Deborah Leong, Elena Bodrova, Chris Lonigan, Barbara Goodson, Sahar Anwar, Jillian Bizzotto, Claire Cook, Suzanne Duvall, Sarah Munro, & Yvette Wu

Building on ground-breaking work from developmental cognitive neuroscience labs, we are administering a battery of objective, neurocognitive EF measures to preschool and elementary-school children to examine the effects of 4 different levels and kinds of executive function training on academic outcomes, executive function, and psychological and behavioral problems (e.g., ADHD & conduct disorder) in a longitudinal randomized field trial with almost 2,000 at-risk children. We hypothesize that EF training will enhance academic achievement in the short-term and that the enhancement will increase over time. Children who have learned to regulate their behaviour and attention are better students, their teachers enjoy them more, and the positive feedback loop can lead, we believe, to continued gains over the years. Preventing problems holds much more promise than trying to reverse problems once they have been allowed to develop. We also predict that children who go through a preschool program that directly teaches and supports EF will be less likely to be diagnosed with disorders of EF (such as ADHD or conduct disorder) because the program will have taught them how to exercise self-control and emotion regulation. (Some children are strongly biologically predisposed to hyperactivity & EF training alone would not be sufficient for them, but many children diagnosed with ADHD today simply never learned to exercise self-regulation.) This has direct relevance to the prevention and reduction of mental disorders and anti-social behaviour.

Publications and Presentations

Wu,Y., Munro, S., & Diamond, A. (paper in preparation). “The Social Simon Effect is seen as Early as the Simon Effect”.

Wu,Y., Munro, S., & Diamond, A. (2007, June). The Social Simon Effect is seen as Early as the Simon Effect. Presented at the Jean Piaget Society Annual Meeting, Amsterdam, Netherlands.

Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., Wu, Y., & Lambaio, J. (2007, March). Statistical learning and word recognition: Nonwords and words mingle. In K. E. Chambers and K. H. Onishi (chairs), Symposium titled “From artificial language learning to normal language processing.” Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Boston MA.

Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., Wu, Y., Lomibao, J. (2006, November). Nonwords and words mingle. Paper presented at the Boston University Conference on Language Development, Boston, MA, USA.

Chambers, K. E., Onishi, K. H., Wu, Y., & Lambaio, J. (2006, June). The influence of nonwords on recognizing words. Poster presented at the International Conference on Infant Studies, Kyoto Japan.

Rosen, N. O., Knäuper, B., Sammut, J. & Wu, Y. (2005, March) Women’s Health \ Behaviours During HPV Screening for Cervical Cancer: Do Individual Differences in Tolerance for Uncertainty Predict Monitoring? Presentation given at the Psychosocial Oncology Research Day, Montreal, Quebec.

Education and Training

Awards

Summer NSERC undergraduate award (2006)